Chip Zdarsky told YouTube’s David Harper he was turned away from the official Spider-Man: Brand New Day afterparty, held at his own hotel, and stopped by security while trying to walk through his own lobby. Rob Liefeld went through something close to identical eighteen months earlier at the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere, and it ended with him quitting Marvel entirely. Zdarsky’s version of the story ends with him shrugging it off and heading upstairs.
Zdarsky laid out the contrast in treatmen. “It was interesting to see the difference between going to the Fantastic 4 premiere, which is obviously a Marvel movie, and we were treated quite well, and it was like really extravagant, and this was a little bit different because it was like a Sony Marvel movie. We weren’t quite the A-list celebrities that we were at the Fantastic 4 premiere.” The comic creators weren’t invited to Sony’s official afterparty, and Zdarsky says that was fine, Marvel Comics had its own smaller gathering. The trouble started once he tried to get back to his own room. “It was happening in my hotel. So I try to get in, and there’s a bunch of people lining up to get into the actual afterparty, and I see a buddy, and I start talking to them, and they stop me, and they’re like, ‘Do you have a ticket? Do you have the bracelet? The bracelet?’ I’m just like, ‘No, I’m a guest here in the hotel’. He’s like, ‘If you don’t have a bracelet, you can’t be here, you can’t be here’. I’m like, ‘I’m sleeping in this hotel’.”
Security tried to remove him from the lobby entirely. “I showed him my card. I’m like, I’m in the hotel. I’m just talking to this guy. He’s like, ‘You got to get out all the way. You’ve got to get out all the way. I’m like, ‘there’s no one here’. I was like, ‘Am I going to get into a fight?’ It’d be pretty funny if you know there’s like a news story about a Marvel comics creator taking a swing at a security guy at the afterparty.” He eventually just pushed past them. “I just pushed by them. I didn’t really want to go to the afterparty anyway, so I was fine. I didn’t get turned away from the party because I wasn’t invited, and I didn’t try to get in. I’d rather hang out with like Marvel creators and Marvel family than, you know, than weird executives.”
Rob Liefeld’s version of this story, as he told it on his Robservations podcast in February 2025, carried none of that shrug. Liefeld said he and his family weren’t invited to the Deadpool & Wolverine afterparty, and that Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige blanked him on the red carpet, an encounter Liefeld described as something meant “to embarrass, diminish, defeat me.” He also said photos of him with the film’s cast and crew, taken at Disney’s own request, were later deleted at his publicist’s request from Marvel’s side. Liefeld traced the friction back further, to Marvel giving co-creator status on Wolverine to editor Roy Thomas in 2023 rather than the writers and artists who actually created the character, and to a 2024 request that he and Fabian Nicieza get lead creator credit on the film itself, similar to what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby have received. That request, by his account, went over badly inside Marvel. “My reps were screamed at today ‘We are NOT Fox!’ Tell me about it. Also hung up on,” Liefeld posted at the time. He put the blame directly on Feige: “Kevin Feige does not treat comic book creators well. That is my personal experience.” Days later, he confirmed he was done with the company entirely: “This last issue of Deadpool Team-Up is my final work with all the gang and my last work with Marvel.” Fabian Nicieza, by contrast, was invited to that same afterparty and confirmed it publicly when asked, adding only that he’d been disappointed the celebrities were roped off in their own section and that his one shot at meeting director Shawn Levy came at adjacent urinals.
The difference between these two stories isn’t the snub. It’s the leverage each creator was working with when it happened. Zdarsky is still an active Marvel and DC writer with ongoing contracts on both sides, credits that keep him inside the industry’s two biggest publishers and inside its convention afterparty circuit by extension. Liefeld had already spent a year publicly souring on how Marvel treats its creators over the Wolverine co-creator credit dispute before the party snub even happened, and he had creator-owned properties and Image Comics to fall back on the moment he decided he was finished. A writer with contracts still on the table has every incentive to laugh off a bracelet dispute with hotel security. A creator who’s already decided the relationship isn’t worth it anymore has nothing left to lose by naming Kevin Feige directly and walking.
Zdarsky’s night didn’t end at that door either. Weeks later at San Diego Comic-Con, he got the full VIP treatment at Marvel Studios’ own post-Hall H party, working a room with Paul Rudd, talking Tim Robinson comedy bits, and standing five feet from Questlove on the decks. “I waltzed in like I owned the place,” he said. By the fourth drink he’d wandered into the DC Comics party uninvited too, dancing with DC’s creators after “sweaty from dancing at Nou.” That’s the treatment a creator with active contracts on both sides of the Marvel/DC divide gets to enjoy. Liefeld doesn’t get invited to either party anymore, because he made sure of it himself.
If Marvel treats its afterparty guest list as a real signal of who the company values, what does it say that the creator still cashing Marvel and DC checks gets waved into every room in the building, while the one who asked for actual creator credit doesn’t get past the lobby?
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